Have you ever been confused about the purpose of this life? Are you unsure of whether God want to bless you or test you? Is His Mercy enough or does He still expect us to obey?
You can turn on the TV one day and hear a message about how God’s will is to bless you. It sounds so good and comforting, and the Scriptures support it. Because of this, you listen to more messages by the same teacher. After awhile, however, you start to notice something strange. He’ll say things like, “There is no more law. There is no longer any commandment. Only Grace!”
Because you’ve read the Bible and know God, you might feel that something is off. Eventually, you may stop listening and find other teachers who “tell it like is”. These don’t talk of a God who wants to pamper you. They talk about a strict God who disciplines and chastises. Words like wrath are used often, and they speak violently against the teachers who talk about blessing, often mocking in derisive scorn. They speak about obedience a lot and say that anyone looking for blessing is a false Christian. Something here is wrong, too.
The difficulty here is, both sides seem to have Scriptures which support their claim. Yet you, the believer, feel frustrated. Something in your spirit tells you that God isn’t in either side, so you find yourself tossed back and forth like waves in a tumultuous sea, which is never at peace.
If this is you, please know that I can relate. At times, I’ve felt like I’m glued to a pendulum going back and forth from side to side, yet I’ve never felt at home.
In this short post, we’ll look at each side and what God has to say.
Life Without Blessing
Life without any blessing or comfort leaves us as terrified subjects, trembling in fear. There was once a famous old sermon called, “Sinners in the hand of an angry God.” The shouting preacher terrified people at the very notion of God. They were told that God is a furious dictator, with His finger on the nuclear button. They imagined Him sitting up there, leaning forward in His chair, just daring you to slip up and give Him a reason.
Yet, the Bible teaches us that He knows the weakness of humanity and is merciful even when we mess up, repeatedly.
Their hearts were not loyal to him, they were not faithful to his covenant. Yet He we merciful;
Psalm 78:37-39
He forgave their iniquities and did not destroy them. Time after time, He restrained His anger and did not stir up His full wrath.
He remembered that they were just flesh…
When you read the Bible, you find that you can barely turn a page without seeing another reminder of God’s mercy, which He gives even in spite of our failure to measure up.
A little time spent in the Word makes you wonder, with so much of the Bible saying this over and over, are these angry teachers even reading the same book?
The Nature of Grace
Likewise, all throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, we are consistently warned to Hear Him and to Follow. He gives us Grace and Mercy to help us find our way back to the Path when we’ve lost our way.
It’s important to remember, Grace is not the Path, itself; rather, it is like the GPS which helps you to identify and find your way back to the Path.
We know that the route is—as it has always been—through Faith in Christ, we follow His steps and obey His Words.
He tells us to take up our Cross, endure difficulty, and to follow Him.
You follow someone because you want to be in the same place. If we do not follow Him (as He commands), then how can we expect to end up in the same place?
Just as modern day spiritualism or “New Age” teaching suggests, much of the church has been corrupted with the same lie — “all roads lead to heaven”. Yet, if your GPS told you that every road and every direction would get you to your destination, you’d throw it out after driving around for hours, never arriving or even getting near to where you wanted to go.
A GPS isn’t meant to make you feel good about the direction you’re going. It’s meant to get you to your destination!
Finding Direction
Before the days of GPS and cell phones, it wasn’t uncommon to get lost. If you were following someone and stopped paying attention for awhile, or if you were on a route and missed your turn, you could end up not knowing where you were. There have been plenty of times where I’ve had this happen in the middle of the night on a long journey. Often, I’d end up driving around lost for hours. The thought of running out of gas and being stranded is a terrifying prospect!
In life, the Grace of God, helps us to find the right direction. As Paul says in Romans 2:4, “The goodness of God is intended to lead you to repentence.” The Greek word for “repent” literally translates to, “to turn around and change direction in your mind”.
In this context, you can see that Grace and Mercy shows you the way, but you must turn the wheel of the vehicle to correct your course! Much like a GPS navigation device, it does you no good to have one if you don’t follow the direction it shows you.
Blessing, Obedience, Testing, Discipline, & Reverence
When I opened my Bible today, I came across Deuteronomy 8 and was struck by how God managed to perfectly weave all of these powerful points into one small chapter. It first struck me at how rare it is today to see these together all in one message. Yet, even more amazing was that instead of being laid out like blocks stacked one on another—one for blessing, another for obedience, etc—it was more like a beautiful tapestry with the threads all woven together. Only God could show what seem so distinctly separate or even opposite, to be so interdependent that you could not tell where one began and the other ended.
Unlike the teachers today who focus solely on blessing or on obedience, this one, small chapter shows how it all fits together, revealing the Truth.
In that moment, as I read, I finally felt “home”. This was the place which the pendulum of religion missed. It was the calm in the sea.
Today, we’ll walk through it, together. The verses are paraphrased, and I’ve added comments below each (in italics).
Deuteronomy 8
1. Be watchful to do all the commands I gave, so you may live and possess the land of blessing that I promised you!
- He calls for obedience and reminds them of the promise of blessing in this life.
2. Remember the wilderness which I used to test and prove your heart. I did this to see if you would keep the commandments.
- He lead them into testing, but it was to prepare and purify them.
3. You were humbled and made to hunger. You were fed with manna (which was foreign to you). Because of this, you learned that man does not live only by food, but he finds life by every Word that comes from God’s mouth.
- Notice, he allowed them to become uncomfortable for a time, stripped of pleasures in order to give them awareness of and hunger for Spiritual strength and blessing.
4. (Yet), I preserved your clothing and did not allow your feet to swell.
- Although He allowed discomfort for a purpose, He did not make them ashamed (as in complete poverty or nakedness) and He did not make the journey unnecessarily painful.
5. Remember – God disciplines you as a father disciplines his children.
- No good father refrains from discipline. Discipline is not indulgence of anger, rather it’s to shape and prepare the child to become a complete adult.
6. He does this so you will keep His Commands and walk in His ways.
- Discipline helps us to remember to follow the GPS and not go our own way, because His Way (which is laid out in His Commands) is the Way to Eternal Life.
7-10. This way is leading you into a land with wealth and plenty of food. It is filled with blessing.
- We endure discipline, discomfort, and hardship, not because God enjoys punishing us, or because it’s the “religious thing to do,” but because it is leading us into blessing, not only in eternity but in this life as well (Mark 10:30)
10-18. When you are blessed, remember the wilderness! Remember how your God protected and provided of you in difficulty. In remembering this, you will keep yourself from becoming arrogant and thinking that you are responsible for all the blessings you’ve received.
- We see the purpose of the Wilderness revealed, here. The Spiritual food we ate when our flesh was hungry reminds us that God is our substance and our source, and that all blessing comes from Him and not ourselves or some other god. He admonishes us to look back to that time as a constant reminder, so that when the tempter comes, we can remember to say (like Jesus did), “Man does not live on bread alone but by every Word that proceeds from the Mouth of God.”
19-20. But if you forget your God and walk after other gods, you will perish and be destroyed like the ungodly nations around you — because you refused to obey the Voice of your God.
- The chapter closes as it began – Hear Him, and keep His Commands.
Summary
It’s almost incredible to see all of these principles so close together and in such a small space. Yet it is only in His Word that we can find Truth so beautifully explained and on display for how it all works together.
I suggest that any time you begin to start feeling confused or begin to question these things, return to this scripture. The simple fact is, if you begin to question what you know to be True, it’s time to spend more time reading the Book and less time listening to the teachers, TV, or social media.
Remember how the serpent in the garden began the first temptation which lead to the first sin…
“Are you sure that God said…?”